Through her work, Phan showcases and explores the effects of various types of legacy, from colonial ones to intergenerational relationships between women artists in post-colonial contexts. The materials she uses in her sculptures—the literature, texts and folklore which form the basis of her watercolours—and the historical incidents she references in her films often speak to the lingering effects of colonialism in her home country. 

She invokes Điêm’s work for the titular piece in the exhibition, Reincarnation of Shadows (Moving-Image-Poem) (2023), interspersing footage of Điêm’s interviews with that of herself interacting with the late sculptor’s public sculptures, as well as texts from Điêm’s personal archives. 

Điêm’s minimalist, geometric sculptures, formed from a variety of materials, such as terracotta, stone, metal, wood and lacquer, often evoke the bodies of women, children or soldiers in poses with strong religious connotations, which allude to political and social histories. Further emphasising the intergenerational relationship between herself and Điêm, Phan created tables for the work which mimic the smooth curvature of the sculptor’s rounded creations, then placed Điêm’s sculptures on. “I feel like we’re interested in the same things,” Phan says of Điêm, “but the presentation is very different. My work looks quite contemporary and it is research-based; there is a lot of historical research involved,” she says.

No Jute Cloth for the Bones (2019-23), a permeable partition made up of stalks of raw jute hung from the ceiling divides, the exhibition space in two: one half for Điêm’s work and the film centred around her, and the other for Phan’s own work. The piece also alludes to Vietnam’s colonial history; in 1945 in North Vietnam, Japanese colonisers forced farmers to stop growing rice and plant jute instead, which could be used for military purposes; this ultimately caused the great famine of 1945. Visitors must pass through the tactile barrier to reach either side of the exhibition. 

A lit sunflower sculpture, The Flower (2016), is placed on right side of the jute partition, and a dove, The Rise (2016), hangs on the wall on the left; both are made from chalk and fabric, and lit with LED lights, materials Phan found in Ho Chi Minh during, Tet (Vietnamese Lunar New Year) celebrations. The pieces reference both Vietnam’s own customs and communist history: the two are celebratory symbols, but the sunflower was used in communist propaganda to signify political allegiance to the party, so its use here evokes the country’s layered and complex history. Traces of Vietnam’s French colonial legacy are evident in Voyages de Rhodes (2014-17), a fragile installation which consists of pages from the book written by 17th-century French missionary Alexander de Rhodes, an instrumental figure in developing a Romanised version of Vietnamese script, which the modern version is based on. Phan paints and draws on the pages, leaving her own mark, and refers to the work as “my own visual diary”. 

This work is an early example of similarly displayed installation, Dreams of March & August (2018-ongoing), which refers to the best months for harvest in Vietnam. It features two young characters named March and August, rendered in Phan’s watercolours, which have a childlike quality, reminiscent of illustrations in children’s books and evoking nostalgia. The characters are shown in various settings across the paintings in the installation, which are made on silk and displayed on double-sided glass so they can be seen from all perspectives—the way Phan believes things should be considered and examined. The figures also reappear in the corresponding film Mute Grain (2019), which is inspired by the short story Starved by Vietnamese writer and journalist To Hoai (1920-2014), who describes the great famine of 1945 in a raw and hard-hitting manner. Phan retells the novel by mixing historical oral testimonies and black-and-white photographs from archives with her own drawn, fictional representations.  

In conceiving these works, Phan looked back at her own childhood growing up in Vietnam in the 1990s and 2000s, when the country had just opened up. “The education we received here was very conventional, and manipulated especially in terms of how history and literature were taught,” the artist says. “So there are a lot of things that are not straightforward. When I imagine my younger self looking at these issues [such as the famine and colonial histories] I talk about in my work, I ask, how can I keep my eyes fresh and innocent in this hostile world?” 

The artist now lives in a part of the country through which a major part of the Mekong River flows. This made her aware of how mass development, dam construction and sand mining changed the course of the river and induced more ecological issues. The artist says the ecological and social costs of “rapid development and the speed at which a developing country needs to adhere to in order to get to some level of power”, are heavy, and have resulted in mass commercialisation, the damaging effects of which extend to the local art scene. 

“In the last two or three years, I feel [the arts scene in Vietnam] become too commercialised,” Phan says. While the market for modern artists and painters is thriving, that for contemporary or conceptual artists is still quite grassroots. Phan, however, hopes that time will fix this. “The arts scene in Vietnam is exciting, but we still don’t have the best infrastructure,” she says. “My own interest in Điêm Phung Thi and other artists—peers who work in a more experimental or conceptual way—is in a way a hope for a more supportive and sustainable art scene.” 

In a similar vein to Điêm, Phan went abroad, completing her MFA at the Arts Institute of Chicago, which enabled her to be fluent in navigating the international art world. Despite her growing global visibility and acclaim, and again, like Điêm, she wants her work to be seen at home, but through an exhibition of international calibre. “I’m a little bit sad because most of my works are nowadays shown in institutions outside of Vietnam,” says Phan. “It’s because I have a lot of support and the structure is also a lot more professional. But I want to have local audiences see my work." 

What works best about Phan’s Milan exhibition as a viewing experience is the cohesion: an element of one work connects with another until everything eventually comes full circle. Her work is fundamentally about cycles: generational, natural, agricultural, ecological, seasonal, generational and, perhaps most importantly, the cycle of learning and unlearning. 

Phan holistically reflects on our current times by addressing the contrasts and nuances, the positives and negatives inherent to them. She balances her critical look at the past with a reverence for figures, incidents and perspectives mitigated from historical teachings. Similarly, her concern for the future is matched by an equally strong hope, one she seeks to reflect in the art she produces in the present. “There is a nostalgic or wistful tendency in my work—not to go back [to another time], but to propose an alternative for future development that doesn’t require too much sacrifice of destruction,” she says. “I am still hopeful.” 

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